The research will undertake to apply information processing theory and methods to processes that underlie the initial stages of reading. It will focus on early stages of the visual input of linguistic materials, i.e., letters, words, and nonsense letter strings, drawn from written forms of Serbo-Croatian. The emphasis will be on the processing relation between two separately acquired and used symbol systems, the organization and accessing of the internal lexicon, the units of recording from visual to phonetic form and on the linguistic level at which visual inputs merge into the special processes of speech. The studies have special advantages for comparisons with English, since the Serbo-Croatian language situation offers exceptional opportunities in visual information processing: 1. there is a single spoken language, but two alphabets (Cyrillic and roman) which are used interchangeably by substantial parts of the population, 2. the script systems are regularly phonemic, i.e., there is a one-to-one correspondence of letter to sound, 3. some of the letter shapes (about a third are common to the two alphabets, and of these letters, some have the same sounds, but some do not, and 4. schooling introduces both alphabets at an early age, with Cyrillic taught first in some areas, and Roman first in other areas. The majority of the proposed studies will be on adult readers to learn about their visual encoding processes; extension are planned to developmental studies of reading acquisition by children. The research is to be done in close collaboration with Haskins Laboratories and substantial parts of the work will parallel research on the reading of English that is being done there is part of program project HD-01994 on the Nature and Acquisition of the Speech Code.